What is flavour?

“Flavour: how food or drink tastes, or a particular taste itself (Cambridge Dictionary, 2024).”

Flavour, taste, palate, character – such terms are used interchangeably to describe what is essentially the same thing – an experience that happens inside one’s head. Is it any surprise, therefore, that an unsavoury amount of confusion exists around the question of ‘what is flavour’?

Surely it should be a simple enough thing to answer. After all, flavour forms a valuable component of everyday life. And for those in the food and drink industry it’s an everyday vocation. But once we begin to tackle the question, it becomes increasingly evident how much we take for granted when it comes to flavour. We can become so focused on the why tipples and nibbles taste a certain way, that we forget to pause and consider what flavour actually is?

Is taste the same as flavour?

Anyone who's dared the sensory experiment of sipping a drink using one hand while pinching one’s nostrils with the other, will know the perplexing disappearing act of flavour. Yet as soon as the nostrils are released by your digits, “Abracadabra Alakazam”, the flavour magically appears. It’s also why ‘taste’ is reduced when one catches a cold. But if flavour has a lot to do with smell, what is taste?

It's intriguing how we casually interchange taste and flavour. We can enjoy a dram’s ‘flavour’ at a whisky ‘tasting’. In fact, a drink may well even be tasty and flavoursome. But why does unsalted food seem tasteless, yet salt enhances its flavour? It’s no wonder that so much confusion exists around these terms.

Taste, as a sense, is of course how we experience sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami, and possibly fatty too. A rather simple array of sensations when compared to the encyclopaedia of different aromas that the nose can detect. So in such terms it would seem that flavour is very much more than the five or six things we can taste. Certainly, odours add many more layers to the conundrum than tastes can ever dream of.

Aroma, taste, and mouthfeel

Combined, aromas and tastes make up a large proportion of flavour, but mouthfeel (chemesthesis) plays an important role too. Mouthfeel is often relegated behind the more centre stage performances of aroma and taste, but mouthfeel is crucial for making flavours complex, interesting and exciting for the brain. Imagine wine without tannins, cream without fat, or sparkling wine without mousse.

Therefore, this is all taken into account in the definition of flavour that is accepted by the scientific community. It’s taken from the ASTM International standards:

“Flavor, n—(1) perception resulting from stimulating a combination of the taste buds, the olfactory organs, and chemesthetic receptors within the oral cavity; (2) the combined effect of taste sensations, aromatics, and chemical feeling factors evoked by a substance in the oral cavity.”

This is a comprehensive, to-the-point explanation of flavour, however, it’s easy to overlook a single word that has perhaps more significance than any others – perception.

Before we dive into perception, as a side note, it’s worth briefly pointing out that mouthfeel is more than Chemesthesis alone - the skin and mucous membranes’ reaction to chemical stimuli. Mouthfeel is also made up of Somatosensation – the network that is responsible for the perception of touch including Thermoception – the detection of temperature and pain. There’s also the Trigeminal Sense, the resistance feedback from biting and chewing.

Now, back to perception.

The perception of flavour

Perception is the awareness of elements in the environment through sensory stimulation. It happens when the brain takes sensory information and organises it into meaningful assessments of the world around us. With regards to eating and drinking, the brain combines odours, tastes, and mouthfeel to construct the concept of flavour.

There’s general misconception that flavour is an absolute quality that exists beyond sensory experience. For example, if a drink is made from a mixture of the chemicals x, y, and z, it should be expected to taste a certain way. But on its own the drink will taste of nothing. The flavour of it will only emerge once it’s entered the mouth the brain creates the sensation based on sensory stimulation. For the large part this is predictable and replicable.

However, we all have different genes, different life experiences, and different brains. So how something will taste to you may be different to how it will taste to I. There’s no way of telling for sure unless the difference is radical, as can be the case with coriander (cilantro). Yes the delicious green herb. Or is it a disgusting green herb?

Due to genetic variation coriander tastes unpalatably soapy and bitter to some people (so I’m told). But it raises the question – is coriander tasty or obnoxious? Both, it would seem. The point is that it’s all a matter of perception, and as perception is created by the brain, this clump of neurons has the power to determine how things taste. But the brain also loves binary concepts - it tastes of coriander or soap - but not both.

Flavour as a system of pleasure

In a nutshell, flavour is the result of stimulation of the olfactory receptors (smell), taste buds, and the various sensations of mouthfeel, as interpreted by the brain. The close relationship between all four elements occurs so autonomously and simultaneously that anyone would be forgiven for simply calling it taste. Flavour then, can be considered as a system. It’s quite a complex system though.

As a system it is the integration of sensory information in the brain, but going one step further, the purpose of this integration is to create a hedonic experience. That is to experience something pleasurable. We don’t just perceive individual tastes and smells separately but as a unified, often pleasurable experience. This hedonic response is usually the first and strongest reaction we have to food and can influence whether we accept it or reject it.

The question is, can we therefore view flavours as units of pleasure? Whether you are a dedicated follower of flavour, or an innocent bystander, the association between drinks reviews and scoring systems will undoubtedly be familiar. It would seem then, that flavour can be given a hedonic score, because surely a review or medal award is nothing more than how much someone enjoyed a flavour.

What is flavour?

Flavour, taste, palate, character – these terms often cause confusion, not just because they seem to describe sensations happening simultaneously in the mouth, but also due to the limitations of our language in capturing their distinct meanings. We smell, taste, and touch different food and drinks as part of flavour – but what do we call the holistic flavour experience? The fact is we have no verb for flavour. So perhaps our attachment to taste, in the English language at least, stems in part from the lack of a suitable alternative.

Flavour is a system that integrates smell, taste, and mouthfeel within the brain. Many other factors influence how the brain interprets the information such as colours, music, temperature, lighting etc. Should these also be included within flavour, or merely influencing factors on flavour? The brain can be easily tricked by simply adding food colouring to wine or making chocolate chunks more rounded. It’s a fascinating topic for another time.

Flavour is more than this though. As we have seen, flavour is also a measurement of hedonistic experience. Would you score this whisky an 85 or 95 out of 100? It’s a simple measurement of how tasty we find it. A raw measurement of hedonism.

What we have covered today represents around one twelfth of the subject matter of our one-day flavour training course. If you enjoyed it, learned from it, and want to see how your team can benefit too, get in touch. We would be delighted to discuss how we can tailor a course to perfectly meet your training needs, and share some wonderful and game-changing insights about flavour.